


The Short Voyage of the Three-wise Man

by 2ndA



Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Canon Backstory, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Episode: s04e04 Harvest, Gen, but also a little Xmas angst, quickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 23:09:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16901559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: Oldshrewsburyian came up with a scenario to match the anonymously-prompted title (maybe it was meant to be "Three Wise Men?"**), and so I wrote this..."I think this is a Christmastide Endeavour fic, less angsty than my wont (or the fandom’s.) The three wise men can be Thursday, Morse, and Bright, each with his own kind of wisdom. The crime is the theft of this charming object (http://collections.ashmolean.org/collection/browse-9148/per_page/100/offset/0/sort_by/random/category/sculpture/start/1415/end/1495/object/50410) from the Ashmolean’s collections. "I set it after season 4 (Harvest), because that is the first winter when Morse is in Oxford and not incarcerated as far as I can tell.  Not exactly spoilery, but will make more sense if you've seen the episodes up through S04. Not at all Brit-picked or betaed, just for fun.**edited to add: I guess it could go either way, and I like this way best ;)





	The Short Voyage of the Three-wise Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OldShrewsburyian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/gifts).



1:CHRISTMAS PAST

Morse had brought the case to his attention—routine inquiry, sir; couldn’t help but notice sir…  Not for the first time, the whole thing seemed like misplaced curiosity.  All the more so since the Ashmolean hadn’t initially noticed anything amiss.  Nevertheless, Bright was inclined to give the boy his head. 

‘Tis the season, Reginald Bright thinks to himself.  The season for indulging the young. If Morse wanted to look into the matter of disordered accession numbers at the University’s oldest museum, well…Oxford had little enough crime over the Christmas holidays, with most of the college staff and nearly all the students gone down until Hilary term. 

“It’s a, a sculpture, you say?” Bright had asked, trying to determine how, exactly, this missing _objet_ related to Morse’s assigned task (tabulating the Oxford City Constabulary’s collection of Ordnance Survey maps).

Morse had tugged awkwardly at his collar and consulted his notebook. “A carved wood relief, probably part of a table-top altar.”

 “Valuable, would you say? The museum hasn’t made any complaints.”

“I don't think anyone's been looking for it until now.  It was part of a bequest several years back...'sixty-two? The donor was a don at Balliol, expert in Greek redware, but had some later pieces.”

“I take it this was one of them?”

“Yes.  Rather the odd one out: Germanic,15th century.” Morse closed his notebook, spoke from memory. “The Greek ceramics are on display, but this was in storage—not much call for medieval European works outside of an official collection. One of the curators had a thought to put it out as part of a holiday display and it isn't where it should be.”

“It’s been missing for _five years_?”  Bright raises his eyebrows.  That seemed like a very cold trail, even for Morse.

“Oh, no, sir!”  Notebook opened again.  “There was removal work over the long vac. Some flooding in one of the storerooms.  Re-catalogued at that time by an S.J. Smallwood.  One of the conservators. That's the last record.”

Bright nodded.  It _had_ been an exceedingly wet summer.  The canals, the marshes, to say nothing of the river. Oxford's stone is deceptive: the city is shot through with water. Christ Church meadow had flooded in August. “So, six months at most.  Give or take.  And you know what you’re looking for?”

Morse had handed over an envelope of black-and-white photographs.  “All new acquisitions are inspected and photographed when they arrive at the Ashmolean.”

Bright had flipped through the photographs. “Very well.  Look into it, keep me informed.  Naturally, if DCI Thursday requires your assistance with those O.S. maps, I’ll expect you to make yourself available.”

“Of course, sir.”  Morse withdrew, leaving Bright to study the photographs more carefully. 

Young man like that: he  should, Bright thinks vaguely, be trying to get _out_ of work for the holidays, not be signing himself up for more.

Bright studies the photo of the missing sculpture.  Well-lit, stamped on the back with an accession number and the Ashmolean seal. Very professional.  Nice to see these things done properly. Bright himself has a few antique pieces (a dagger, a brooch, part of a diadem) that came into his possession in India.  Nothing particularly rare, but interesting, nonetheless. The metal work is quite fine, he’s been told; the dagger’s inlaid handle is of a kind no longer seen on the subcontinent. He’s thought once or twice of donating them to one of Oxford’s many collections when the time comes. 

A ritual dagger, a Punjabi wedding brooch, a section of a rajah’s ceremonial diadem.  They would have gone to Dulcie, of course, if she had lived.  Or…or to her siblings.  After that terrible fever season—Dulcie and four other cantonment children gone, thirty servants dead, half the hill station ill for weeks—he and Mrs. Bright had never discussed having more children. And there had never been any.   It might have been the effects of the fever; Lillian was laid quite low before Dulcie even showed any symptoms.  It might have been Bright’s own tendency to take on assignment farther and farther from the station, rather than return each night to the too-empty bungalow.    Farther and farther afield until he found himself here, at Cowley Street Station.

Dulcie had _delighted_ in Christmas, Bright remembers.  Born at the British Hospital in Madras, raised all her six years in the colonial encampments, she’d never known snow or pine trees or sleighs outside of holiday cards and picture books, but she had believed in them as easily as some children believe in Father Christmas.  Those few Christmases with Dulcie—for Dulcie—had been the most magical days Bright had ever experienced.

It should bother him more, Christmas without Dulcie, without the siblings she never had, without the grandchildren he will never have. But instead, he and Lillian recognize the day in their own simple, entirely respectable way. They drink sherry and listen to the Queen’s speech on the wireless.  They go to the early church service and play a hand of bridge. No, Christmas is all well and good; other days are harder.  Dulcie’s birthday at the end of the rainy season, which no one now alive remembers except for himself and Lillian.  Mothering Sunday.   That day, once a year, when he visits his bank manager to discuss his investments and what’s to be done with the three Indian pieces that have lain the bank vault since he returned to Britain after the war.

Doesn’t bear thinking about, Bright decides.  Not tonight.  Not when it is threatening snow and he has to stop off at Ritchardson’s for the teacakes that Lillian plans to serve to her bridge group. He’s not entirely surprised to note that Morse is still at his desk, his lamp a small pool of light in the dim squad-room.

Outside, on Cowley Street, Bright breathes in the stony chill of Oxford’s winter.  In weather like this, the tropics seem like a long-ago fever dream. Some of the younger men had been laying bets on a snowy Christmas. Bright did not generally approve of that sort of casual behavior, but he had pretended not to hear. A season for indulging the young, for the giving of gifts. Yes, he thinks.  A dusty vitrine in the Ashmolean and a small, typed pasteboard sign: _Generous Donation of Chief Superintendent and Mrs. Reginald Bright, in memory of their daughter._ When he is gone, the city of Oxford shall have his treasures.

 

2: CHRISTMAS PRESENT

Jim Strange says what they’ve all been thinking.  He takes one squinting look at the wooden sculpture, nested in the very apron the museum cleaner had smuggled it out in, and announces, “Looked bigger in the picture, didn’t it, matey?”  

He’s talking to Morse, but Inspector Thursday is inclined to agree with him.  In the Ashmolean's photographs, the sculpture filled the frame, a parade of carved figures with nothing to give any sense of the scale.  The Madonna, her Child, the three wise men trailing off to the right.  The Ashmolean had been quite precise in their record-keeping (right up until they’d moved the thing from one storage room and S. J. Smallwood neglected to see if it arrived in the other).  So Fred knows the dimensions. But it is still a surprise to see how easily Morse held the thing, cradling it like a baby.

“I’d leave it in the evidence lock-up, sir, but the damp…”

“No, you’re alright.  Just pop it on the table there.  Chief Superintendent Bright said there would be someone by from the museum to claim it.”

Morse eases the awkward bundle onto the evidence table, the white cloth of the apron mounded around the wooden stable like unseasonable snow. 

They all examine it—Morse and Strange and Thursday.  Even Trewlove pauses in the act of putting on her overcoat.  Such a lot of fuss for such a small thing.  That’s when Strange makes his comment.

“Well, its pearwood.  Pear trees don’t grow that large,” Morse muses.  “And there was rather a lot of demand for it in the middle ages—musical instruments and so forth.  A large sculpture would’ve cost the earth.”   He states these facts as casually as though this sort of knowledge is almost too common to be worth mentioning.  “Probably only survived this long because it’s small. Easily moved.” When he becomes aware of their curious stares, he shrugs diffidently. “The Germanic kingdoms spent most of the 15th century at war.” 

“Leopard can’t change its spots,” snorts Thursday.   He doesn’t know much about art, but nor does he have a high opinion of the Germans.

 “There’s quite a cult for the Magi in Cologne,” Trewlove pipes up. Thursday wonders, as he often does, who knows more random oddments: his bagman, or the WPC.  They’re neither of them much to look at, to be sure, but what one doesn’t know, the other one does.

“Bavarian, I would have thought.  That Madonna looks Italian, doesn’t she?”  Morse uses the same tone that he uses when talking about his opera characters, like he's met the woman somewhere and is trying to recall the exact circumstances. He reaches out and runs a finger along the roofline, then turns to Thursday:

“May I take the car, sir?  I really ought to bring those maps back to Ms. Frazil.”

“Hmm?  Oh, yes,” _The Mail_ had loaned them three maps needed to finish their Ordnance Survey review.  “Mind how you go.  Newspaper said snow.”

 ***

Alone with the statue, Fred draws closer, studies it more intently.  He can just make out the faint line where the two pieces of wood were neatly joined by some long-dead cratfsman. He’d seen a lot of religious statues in Italy, during the war.  Hadn’t bothered much, himself, but the people there set a great store by them.  He wonders how this one came to survive all those years, his own war and all the ones before it. How it came to be sitting here in Oxford, in the Cowley Street nick.  That’s the real mystery, not where it went to for a few months during renovations.  He examines the figure behind Mary.  Joseph, he deduces, either doffing his cap or scratching his head at the strange and regal company.  Fred’s always had sympathy for Joseph in the Christmas story, understands that sudden moment of waking up and wondering how you ended up with this for a life.

 _Once in Royal David’s City_ —that’s how the old hymn goes? _Once in Royal David’s City, stood a lowly cattle shed…_

Close his eyes and Fred Thursday can still hear his Sam singing it, years ago when his son had been just a boy, voice as fragile and shimmering as spun glass.

Win had a nice voice, Fred has always thought.  Sometimes she’d murmur the lyrics to a song when they danced.  Joanie, like Fred himself, couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.  Surprisingly, it had been Sam who had startled them all by coming home from primary school one day with an invitation to audition for the Oxford Boys’ Choir. 

“The music master asked me,” Sam had reported casually when his mother had asked. “Thought I might go with Tom from down the street.  See how we get on.”

Gone he had.  And auditioned, and won a place, and a solo, and then another after that.    Fred had been working his way up through the ranks in those years, missing more hot dinners than he’d eaten, but he’d always made a special effort to make it to Sam’s performances.  It had never failed to astonish him: he’d rush in, too late for a seat, standing in the crush in the back of the church, and see a small but recognizable figure step out from the group.  His son’s familiar little face on top of a choirboy’s ruff and then the boy would open his mouth and the most extraordinary sound would pour out.

There had been talk, perhaps inevitably, of a choral scholarship with that _other_ university choir, the one at King’s College in Cambridge.  King’s College had become well-known during the war for carrying on with their Christmas-time Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols despite the black-out,  despite the fact that the King’s College Chapel was bitterly cold, all the stained glass having been removed for fear of bombing. Each year, war or peace, the concert begins with a single boy, a treble soloist, singing _Once in Royal David’s City._

Sam had been ambivalent, his boyish loyalty offended by the idea of singing for a city that he knew only as Oxford’s competition in the yearly Boat Race.

“Think I should, Dad?”

“It’s a talent, son, and you’ve worked at it,” Fred remembers telling him.  “But it’s your talent, and I reckon you can do with it what you like.” It had been around this time of year, that conversation: a sparkling cold evening more than a decade ago that seems like yesterday. He’d walked from this very station to collect the boy after practice at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin.  They’d stopped to watch men hanging garlands on the Radcliffe Camera.

In the end, there had been another audition.  Sam had sung well ( _Comfort, Comfort, O My People)_ in a year of keen competition and few places.  Sung so well that the King's choirmaster had contacted Fred and Win to suggest that Sam return in a year, a little more experienced, and audition again.    But a year on, Sam had decided he’d rather play football with Tom and his mates after school, rather get an evening job running deliveries for Burridge's Department Store, rather be a regular Oxford lad and not a prodigy.  Nowadays, he sings only with his mother, chiming in with the wireless while they share the washing up when he's home on leave.

Thursday returns his attention to the statue. Small it may be, but he is pleased that they found it.  Morse had handled most of the job himself, gone directly to Bright with his notebook, had his homework done and his facts in a row, just as he’d been taught.  Worked through eight months of the Ashmonlean staff rotas and scheduling diaries, asked the right questions of the right people, refused to take 'no' for an answer.  A neat bit of coppering, if Fred Thursday has anything to say about it.

Morse sings with a choir, Thursday remembers—the Oxford Scholars something or other.  Thursday supposes they must have concerts occasionally.  He could ask Morse sometime, maybe take Win out, make a night of it.  Give her something to write in her weekly letters to Sam, now stationed somewhere in Germany.  Near Cologne?, Thursday wonders.   Or maybe somewhere in Bavaria.

 

3: CHRISTMAS YET TO COME

Morse has the sheaf of O.S. maps in one hand and the car keys in the other when a uniformed officer passes him in the hall. “Young lady to see you, Morse.” His heart twists and leaps for a moment, just the way it had when the Ashmolean cleaner had opened her front door and Morse had glanced over her shoulder and seen the missing statue, laid out on a crocheted tablecloth in her bedsit.  The surprise of seeing something special but familiar, in an unfamiliar place. 

He’s still struggling to put his arm though the sleeve of his coat without dropping all of Ms. Frazil’s maps when he pushes through the door to the lobby.  If he’s not quick, she’ll vanish again.  Only...she’s too tall, her long hair a shade too light.  He recognizes the sunny yellow coat a moment before the young lady turns.

“Joycie?”

“Hullo, you.” His stepsister has had the same shy smile since she was six. 

He’s too surprised to be disappointed that she isn’t someone else.  “What are you…? Where’s—uhm—”

“Mam?  She’s with my Auntie Bea until New Years’.”

Morse can’t remember Auntie Bea, if he ever knew her.  His stepmother’s numerous sisters maintain a constant state of squabbling alliances and petty, rivalrous intrigues whose complexity dwarfs the Wars of the Roses. “And you’re…not?” he offers, diplomatically

Joycie smiles again, like she can read every thought in his head. Perhaps she can.  “The two of them are each as bad as the other.  You know how they get.  Mr. Macallister at the factory had to go to London for meetings, needed a stenographer who didn’t mind being away from home for Christmas.”  

“That’s…” he’s too slow, searching for the adjective, and he sees her confidence waiver.

“I would have telephoned, but I thought you’d tell me not to come.  D’you mind? That I’ve come?”

And what can Morse say to that?  “No!  No, not at all.  It’s.  It’s wonderful.  I just—”

“Have to work?” It’s eerie, hearing his father’s constant refrain in Joycie’s voice.

“No!  Well, yes.  But only—look, I’ve got to drop these 'round the Oxford _Mail_ office and then I offered a friend a ride.  But after that, we’ll go and get something to eat and you can tell me all about London.”

Joycie seems to decide that he’s genuinely pleased to see her. “Shall I come with you, then?”

And right there, in the lobby of the Cowley Street police station, Morse feels himself blush.

“Ahh.  That sort of friend?,” Joycie lowers her voice knowingly, too kind to tease.  “I’ll just wait here for you, shall I?”

 ***

Joan Thursday is waiting for him outside a block of flats on the far side of Oxford. A school friend is out of town, has let Joan stay in her flat while she is visiting her fiancee’s family in the Midlands for the holidays.  “Bonds forged in sixth form history,” Joan had said with the wry smile. He wonders if it is a coincidence, her choosing a place so hard for anyone to find her.  But of course not: she’s her father’s daughter.

Between cases, Morse had looked in on her, three or four times since she'd been discharged from the hospital, and when she'd mentioned telephoning her parents, he'd tried to be encouraging. Inspector Thursday had come into the station the next morning _whistling_ , so Morse figures his little deceptions have been worth it.  And when she mentioned taking the bus to see her parents for Christmas Eve, Morse had barely been able to contain himself.

“I wish,” Morse had started, when she'd first broached the topic.  Then stopped: he’s got no right, really, to ask anything of Joan Thursday.  Then he found himself barreling on anyway.  “I wish you’d let me drive you.”

And Joan had studied him, soberly, a faint crease in her forehead like she understood how rare it was that he asked anyone for anything.  Morse had thought he’d have to convince her, negotiate, persuade.  But something in his face must have argued for him, because she’d said, simply, “All right, then.”

For most of the trip, his route is the same as the one he takes most mornings to get Inspector Thursday to work.  But this time, he stops the car a block away from the Thursdays’ house.  “I hope you don’t mind walking the last little bit.  I didn’t exactly, uhm.  I haven’t—”

That shrewd, studying look again.  “You haven’t told my parents you’d be driving me?”

Morse shakes his head. 

“Well, Morse. You’ve kept my secrets; I’ll keep yours.” Joan sounds as though she's making a solemn promise, rather than just keeping his name out of it. He’d always thought of her as such a light-hearted girl.  Had she always been so serious?  “Will you come in?”

He—wants to. He’s surprised at how much.  But he doesn’t want the explanations, the exclamations. Inwardly, he is already cringing at the idea of his own awkward responses to Mrs. Thursday’s kindness, to Inspector Thursday’s knowing glance. And then, of course, there’s Joycie.

***

Morse parks the car, turns the key into the officer managing the municipal parking lot, and starts the walk up Cowley Street to the station.  From halfway down the block, he can see the station Christmas tree, baubles catching the gleam from the streetlamps.  Sergeant Jenkins had set it up. In two days, it will be the centerpiece of the Widows and Orphans Boxing Day luncheon, starring the Sergeant himself as jolly old St. Nick.

Christmas trees.  Such a strange tradition.  Morse distinctly remembers the first one he’d ever seen up close: a vast spruce laden with glass ornaments and silvered ribbons that had filled the entrance hall at the grammar school where he was a scholarship boy.  Morse’s mother would occasionally bring home winter greens for the mantle or put a glass of red holly berries out like flowers in a vase…but that wasn’t special.  She loved the out-of-doors, often brought in autumn leaves or snowdrops or the overblown roses that grew in the garden.  Traditional Quakers don’t decorate for Christmas.  To them, each day is the Lord’s Day, every one as holy as the next, as sacred as the one before.  His father had always demanded a full Christmas dinner—goose or turkey, mince pie for pudding—but since he had always been too quarrelsome for organized religion, that had been the extent of the celebration when Morse was a child. 

That grammar school tree couldn’t possibly have been as large as Morse remembers it being.  Now, of course, he knows about the pagan roots and the revived Victorian traditions.  But at the time it had seemed such a peculiar and magical thing that he had no trouble believing it had been arranged by North Pole elves. He'd been unwise enough to say as much.  The other boys had been merciless in their mocking.

Still your mind; he'd never got the knack.  Even now, Morse finds himself idly drawing connections as he walks, building patterns: Christmas tree, pear tree, wooden stable, wooden cross.  The Ashmolean cleaner hadn’t been the least bit concerned to have the City Police on her doorstep.  “Didn’t nobody need it,” she’d said when Morse had asked about the origins of her stolen property.  “And I would've put it back. Didn’t hardly notice it was gone, did they?”  And Morse had to admit (although not to her) that the Ashmolean had not, in fact, realized that one small piece of their collection had gone missing in the summer clean-up.  Polished to a shine, given pride of place on her tiny sideboard, the Nativity statue probably hadn’t seen such devotion since the Middle Ages. He suspects the museum will be content to drop any charges once they have the statue back.  They won’t want to advertise their own carelessness.  Nor will they want to employ Mrs. Caroline Hartwell in future, even if the western storage room floods again.

Joycie waves to him from the front steps of the Cowley Street station.  Morse can think of two pubs that will still be serving food, offers her the choice, and they set off.

“Sooo,” Joycie teases, drawing out her flat, familiar Northern vowel. “How was your day, then?” She tucks her mittened hand under his arm.   “Save the world, did you?”

Morse smiles.  “Oh, a bit of it, I suppose.”


End file.
